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Where lockdown is a fairytale In Ann Patchett's Bel Canto, hostages are happy

Who wouldn't want to be stuck in a Central American villa forever? Credit: Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Who wouldn't want to be stuck in a Central American villa forever? Credit: Slim Aarons/Hulton Archive/Getty Images


August 30, 2021   4 mins

In an unnamed Latin American country, at the Vice-President’s house, a birthday party has been thrown for a Japanese businessman named Katsumi Hosokawa, in the hope that he will invest in the failing state. Hosokawa loves opera and so, to entice him, the world-renowned soprano Roxane Coss has been invited to sing. After several songs, amid applause, the lights go out. A troop of armed terrorists, who have been hiding in the pipes, burst out and seize the house. Like the guests, they are entranced by Coss’s voice — which gives a name to the novel that opens with these events: Ann Patchett’s Bel Canto.

The terrorists’ intention had been to kidnap the President but, at the last moment, he had cried off and stayed at home to watch his favourite soap-opera. So instead, the terrorists put all the guests — later whittled down to just the men and Coss — under house-arrest. What follows is the slow unfurling of life under siege, or what Alex Clark described as “long stretches of incarcerated ennui.”

Though I had been held hostage by germs not guerrillas — and with my family, not strangers — this mood felt familiar when I picked up Bel Canto over the summer. Incarcerated ennui is one way of describing our basic shared state during lockdown. The four months that the hostages remain in the vice-presidential house, largely confined to a single room, is in one sense present “a vast ocean of time” for the hostages, who are:

largely unfamiliar with the concept of free time. The ones who were very rich stayed at their offices late into the evening. They sat in the backseats of cars and dictated letters while their drivers shepherded them home. The ones who were young and very poor worked just as hard albeit at a different kind of work.

But, “now a great, unfamiliar idleness had fallen on them.”

Hosokawa starts to learn Spanish, committing himself to memorising ten nouns a day and one verb, fully conjugated. His diligence reminded me of those (economically privileged) people who responded to the novelty of lockdown by conjuring sourdough starters and gardening. So many of us found solace in the reassuring rhythms of repetitive projects; perhaps they reminded us of school. Indeed, there was a childlike enthusiasm — among the childless, at least — to make the most of the first lockdown.

Confinement turns Patchett’s hostages into children, too: it gives them time to play, to learn about themselves. One of the teenage hostages turns out to have a very good operatic voice. Tetsuya Kato, a slightly built, greying numbers man at Hosokawa’s company, is revealed to be an exquisite pianist and Coss’s natural accompanist. Ruben Iglesias, the Vice-President, discovers that he “had been taken care of for too long,” and derives great satisfaction from becoming everyone’s houseboy. “Perhaps he had been useful in society,” he reflects, but “he had received no domestic training.” Lockdown domesticated many hitherto high-flying yet impractical individuals, just as, for Ruben, “it had taken a state of captivity to force him to figure out the operation of his own washer and dryer.” There was a choice involved, though: “Of course Ruben could have let it all go … He could have watched the carpets molder in pools of spilled soda pop and stepped around the trash.” How many of us were tempted, to do just that?

The positive self-actualisation of the characters reflects the novel’s tone; as one reviewer put it, it is less Lord of the Flies and more Lord of the Butterflies. It is optimistic, premised on the idea that captivity with others will ultimately produce a civilising effect — and will draw out qualities that would have gone unrecognised in the hostages’ normal lives. Like children on an interminable summer holiday, they start by being bored and listless, but then grow inventive and find creative roles that make the most of their talents. But for the privileged, in lockdown, it was the opposite. The second lockdown, without the backdrop of that glorious spring, challenged the enthusiasm for new projects; people grew frustrated at the monotony and claustrophobia. Bored of playing, stuck at home, we sulked like children, insulated from the world.

Those with children, though, had a radically different experience. Like Hosokawa’s translator, Gen — the one person in Bel Canto who finds himself with more to do rather than less — parents found, in lockdown, that time became not an ocean but a pathetic, parched trickle: home-schooling, relentless meal preparation, constant supervision. The only faint compensation was that the world took notice, for a moment, to the enormous burden that is care. Stay-at-home parents, carers, and cleaners had a moment of vindication: behold, you mighty, and despair!

We are all in the same boat, went the spiel. Confinement unites the hostages. But Coss — with whom all the men, apparently not a single homosexual among them, have fallen in love — is granted the luxury of a bedroom upstairs, with a deep soft bed, while the men bunk down on the floor — finding a place on the rug if they can, on the cold marble floor if they cannot. They, and we, may have been adrift on the same sea, but some were in dinghies, and some were in yachts.

Still, for all of us, lockdown changed our relationship to time. Every life was on hold. Mark O’Connell, author of Notes From An Apocalypse, described lockdown as “a collapse of the experience of time, and of the sense of its meaning,” and reckoned in April that “the flatness of the days, the endless sameness, is building towards some cumulative emotional effect and we have not yet begun to take the measure of it.”

For those confined in the VP’s house, their time outside of time is like a fairy tale. Teenage rebels raised in one-room huts learn to read and cook; hostages fall in love; one young guerrilla becomes like a son to Iglesias. The power of the bel canto — the beauty of Coss’s voice — weaves a spell that makes many of the hostages dream that their state could continue forever, that they could just stay in the big house with the beautiful singing and food brought to their door. Hosokawa has “never been so alive and so much a ghost.”

But, like all things faerie, this enchanted world is an illusion. It is not the President’s soap-opera. The hostages and the terrorists — for whom we also start to care — are in a situation in which there is no possibility of a happy ending, and yet we fantasise one with them. While “Mr. Hosokawa was overwhelmed by love, he could never completely shake what he knew to be the truth: that every night they were together could be seen as a miracle,” because “at some point these days would end, would be ended for them.” Even as “he wished he could stop time,” “he understood that these were extraordinary times, and if their old life was ever restored to them, nothing would be the same.” The hostages must grow up all over again, and re-enter their old and separate worlds — which look completely unfamiliar.


Suzannah Lipscomb is Professor Emerita of History at the University of Roehampton and the host of the Not Just The Tudors podcast from History Hit. She has written numerous books, including The King is Dead: The Last Will and Testament of Henry VIII and The Voices of Nîmes: Women, Sex, and Marriage in Reformation Languedoc.

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Neven Curlin
Neven Curlin
3 years ago

I don’t think I will ever care for the terrorists who are holding the world hostage.

Alan Hawkes
Alan Hawkes
3 years ago
Reply to  Neven Curlin

Stockholm syndrome?

Dennis Boylon
Dennis Boylon
3 years ago
Reply to  Neven Curlin

WHO Director-General Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus “It’s completely understandable that people want to get on with their lives, but we will not be going back to the old normal.” They know what they are doing.

Galeti Tavas
Galeti Tavas
3 years ago

“The terrorists’ intention had been to kidnap the President”

Why? It never says. Much like this covid response, the West bankrupted, Rights and freedom irrevocably (I assume) removed, essentially Martial law imposed on a once free people. Business people worked a lifetime creating, generations sometimes, destroyed at the stroke of an unelected bureaucrat’s pen. Prisoners released en-mass, law abiding citizens locked up in their hundreds of millions. Rioting left unchecked wile not wearing a mask criminalized. Education destroyed for the youth, which will never be made up. Millions of long term medical crises left un-diagnosed, mental health and substance abuse skyrocketed – and on top; internal passports required, and only by submitting to medical experiments will they be issued.

And as every study (none done officially – such studies are actively suppressed) suggests – all this harm only to have worse results than if mere personal responsibility had been taken.

The fate of the Kidnappers is not mentioned. Justice would require those who did this same thing to the entire West (barring North Dakota and Sweden) should face some similar kind of sanction, what ever it was.

Arild Brock
Arild Brock
3 years ago

Basic boredom shines through this article. It seems like only those who really have (or had) a life under normal circumstances unambigously prefer it to lockdown.

Dustshoe Richinrut
Dustshoe Richinrut
3 years ago

“In an unnamed Latin American country, at the Vice-President’s house, …”
— so any old Latin American country can be imagined. Poor old Latin America. It’s not Brazil though, as Hosokawa takes up Spanish. I think residence is a better word than house.

“After several songs, amid applause, the lights go out. A troop of armed terrorists, who have been hiding in the pipes, burst out and seize the house.”
— The pipes? What pipes? The soprano’s pipes? Well, of course the lights would go out. Power cuts happen all the time in a failing state. The troop … the … troop of armed terrorists? Did they trot in in formation? They did not even probably have to bother finding the fuse box.

“Like the guests, they are entranced by Coss’s voice – …”
— Well, if only the ones now in charge in a certain country in Asia Minor that shall remain unnamed could fall for the charms of the opera and the lady’s voice. If only they and their troops could, then we’d be going places. They may be nice, but they’re not as nice as the guys depicted in this book.

“The terrorists’ intention had been to kidnap the President, but, at the last moment, he had cried off and stayed at home to watch his favourite soap-opera.”
— It sounds as if the President would have been the only one quick enough, with enough wit, had he not apparently cried off, to make good his escape at the moment the terrorists lost momentum in their becoming quite suddenly entranced by the soprano.

“So instead, the terrorists put all the guests — later whittled down to just the men and Coss — under house-arrest. What follows is the slow unfurling of life under siege, or what Alex Clark described as ‘long stretches of incarcerated ennui.’”
— Whittled down? Taken out? Of the equation? How can a group of people be under house-arrest and under siege at the same time? Terrorists don’t have the authority to place someone under house-arrest, moreover. They are a gang, not a governmental authority. Who’s Alex Clark?

A little aside:
“Why should I employ both of you, Mr Hardy and Mr Laurel? You both seem to have done nothing in the first four months of this year?”
“Well, you see, I and my companion Stan suffered through a long bout of … incarcerated ennui. We could do nothing about it.”
“Yes, Ollie, you see we were bored silly and did nothing. It was a horrible thing. We were first diagnosed with couch potato syndrome, but then it was found that we were suffering incarcerating ennui. Isn’t that right, Ollie?”
“Wh…, there you have it!”

“Though I had been held hostage by germs not guerillas — …”
— Held hostage? Confined. Guerillas? Pests! House guests and pests, you are talking about.

Why do the cultured go to such lengths to excuse their great time to themselves? Why do they go to great lengths to dress up time? I recall the days before double-glazing became common when I stared at raindrops, no, condensation it was, trickling down window panes. Trickling in zig-zag fashion, I might add. It was … cool. Actually something to do. And I’m not ashamed to say it. Nobody need feel guilty for doing absolutely nothing.

Alex Stonor
Alex Stonor
3 years ago

I want to read the book now.

Richard Riheed
Richard Riheed
3 years ago

What the writer doesn’t say is, is the novel any good? I read ‘The Dutch House’ by the same author as we (Book Club) had heard good things about her. We were disappointed. Very interesting start to the book but never gained much traction. Would try another, to give her the chance of redemption. Anyone else read her?